No comments about Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World.

2 comments about Travels with the Evil Inclination: A Rabble-Rousing Renegade Rabbi's Story.

1. I hesitated to write this review because this book made me so sad.
   
   Rabbi Winkler's earliest books (e.g., Soul of the Matter, Dybbuk, Golem) reflected a high level of Jewish scholarship and dedication to truth. If you followed up the sources cited in the footnotes of Rabbi Winkler's early books, you'd have ended up with a pretty broad and deep grounding in Jewish spiritual subjects. Back then Rabbi Winkler had that breadth and depth of knowledge. He perhaps had the potential to be on the level of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan z"l, one of the finer American-Jewish scholars of the last fifty years, who succeeded, with integrity, in making previously closed subjects available to a much wider audience.
   
   And then Rabbi Winkler lost his way.
   
   This book is the work of someone who seems seriously confused about what Judaism is. He rejects the core of Jewish practice (like performing work/m'lah-kha on Shabbat) in favor of libertine-ism, behaving more like a New Age neo-pagan than a Jew.
   
   Like one of the four who entered "Paradise" (of the four only Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and left in peace), he has "uprooted his plantings", effectively undoing much of the good that he accomplished earlier in his life.
   
   If I had to distill his argument, I'd say that his main gripe is that over the last two-thousand years Judaism has grown too narrow and constraining, restricting the average Jew from polygamy, sex before marriage, sex outside of marriage, shamanism, witchcraft and earth magic. While he wants to understand how the Torah masters of previous generations were able to perform miracles, instead of following in their footsteps by living as they did according to Halakha (the Jewish legal system) and investigating from within their system, he rejects their teachings & methods and sets out on his own peculiar path.
   
   Perhaps the Jewish community would have paid more attention to him and his opinions had he made the effort to rise to the level of one of the rabbinic leaders of our generation. Instead, he left the community and wrote a book like this.
   
   Oy Gershon, Gershon, Gershon...



2. First off, Gershon Winkler is funny, very funny. At times, extremely funny.

   But the thing is.... This is the story of an irresponsible man.

   Winkler leaves his wife and young daughter's to find himself.
   He turns his back on his family, and leaves his wife and daughters to fend for themselves in Brooklyn, while he has a middle age crisis of sorts in Los Angeles.

   He says that he needs to get away from it all, but ends up remarrying and having another daughter.

   No matter how funny Winkler may be, it can't detract from his irresponsible nature.

No comments about Reach for the Stars: A Little Torah's Journey.

No comments about What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History).

5 comments about A Jump for Life: A Survivor's Journal from Nazi-Occupied Poland.

1. 
   Originally written in 1946, Cyprys' account is remarkably free of the Judeocentric, German-whitewashing, anti-Christian, and anti-Polish tendencies of today. She devotes almost as much attention to German crimes against Poles as to those against Jews. Furthermore, Cyprys makes it clear that the Germans regarded the Poles as having no more inherent right to live than the Jews. Consider what happened when two Poles were mistakenly herded with Jews into a Treblinka-bound train: "Two gentiles in our wagon tried to explain to the Germans that they did not fit into this society and tried to show their documents. All to no avail. `Even if you are not a Jew, you are a damned Pole', yelled the German, and slapped the older woman's face, barking `Polish swine' and with his rifle butt drove her to the wagon." (p. 95).
   
   Cyprys reported a balanced range of Polish attitudes towards Jews (pp. 118-119, 127, 132), some of which varied within the same family (pp. 142-143). Ironically, she was helped by the obsessively anti-Semitic Mrs. Zosia, who felt sorry for the Jews and who aided them (pp. 220-221).
   
   In his FEAR, Jan Tomasz Gross presents a distorted view of Poles acquiring Jewish properties during the German occupation. In contrast, when mentioning how some Poles pretended to be Volksdeutsche in order to join in the German-sponsored pillage of Jewish properties, she nevertheless added: "The local mob usually guided the Germans to the rich Jewish houses and stores. With the deepest shame I must admit that there were some Jews among the scum." (pp. 25-26).
   
   One inflammatory Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about Jews, while being transported to the death camps and with full knowledge of their impending deaths, being forced to endure the sight of indifferent or gleeful Polish onlookers. Against such nonsense, we learn that the death trains had small, barred windows well above eye level, and with nothing to stand on in order to look out of them (p. 96). Viewing (in either direction) was nearly impossible. The author and her daughter were loaded on a Treblinka-bound train. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Cyprys was boosted up and enabled to cut through the bars to jump out and to have her daughter Eva (Ewa) get pushed out.
   
   The oft-quoted Polish remarks about Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising "getting burned like bugs", although invariably presented as such, wasn't necessarily derogatory. After all, Poles used the same phrase to refer to themselves in the face of their defenselessness against German incendiary bombing during the Warsaw Uprising! (p. 200).
   
   The Germans strongly promoted alcoholism among Poles. This was done in order to degrade them (Lemkin elaborated on this) and to exploit this dependency as leverage in the denunciation of fugitive Jews (p. 174).
   
   Cyprys elaborates on the semi-collaborationist Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa): "There were policemen who would accept neither bribes nor ransoms but, for the sake of their ideology, would hand over the Jews. Looking at this group objectively, however, one has to say that among their ranks there were many Volksdeutsch volunteers. The activities of the Polish police aroused such hostility among the majority of the Polish people, that death sentences were passed on several policemen by the Polish underground organizations and executions were carried out by Polish lads...upon the orders of the Organization a detailed list of all policemen was kept in the Underground offices. These contained, apart from proved misconduct, evidence of their standard of living which ascertained whether a dark blue was profiteering from blackmail or extortion. These lists of evidence were kept till the Warsaw Uprising: I do not know whether they survived the insurrection." (p. 138).
   
   However, by no stretch of the imagination was the Polish Blue Police the main force in the roundups of Jews for their deaths: "On about 5 August [1942] all `workshop territories' were hermetically closed and the Germans and Ukrainians started a ruthless expulsion of anyone found outside these areas--always with the efficient help of the Jewish militia. Wherever a German or a Ukrainian did not venture the militia men would gladly fish out as many as possible of those still hidden in cellars and vaults, only to oblige the Germans." (p. 52).
   
   Most Polish blackmailers (szmalcowniki), "the scum of mankind" (p. 119), took only part of the belongings of their Jewish victims and didn't usually actually denounce Jews to the Germans (pp. 119-120). They sometimes excused their conduct by their poverty and even gave the Jews advice on how better to disguise their Jewishness (p. 140).
   
   Underworld Poles weren't the only ones that fugitive Jews feared: "The Jewish Gestapo men who remained alive were very dangerous. Their eyes were penetrating and Jews pointed out by them were lost beyond hope." (p. 165). Cyprys personally observed them shouting Jewish slogans or singing Jewish songs in order to provoke a telltale reaction in fugitive Jews among the pedestrians (pp. 165-166).
   
   Cyprys alludes to Zegota as follows: "It goes without saying that only a fraction of the Jews in hiding knew about the existence of this committee. Those who were in touch with the patriotic `Polish intelligentsia' or people who worked in the Underground were most likely to benefit. Everything was obviously carried out in the greatest secrecy, using all available means of security." (p. 150). Complaints about Zegota aiding only a modest number of Jews are clearly off the mark.
   
   In fact, Cyprys has a very sage understanding of ALL underground activities: "In reality underground activities were extremely stressful and required a great deal of steadiness and concentration. And because it had gone on for so many years, it was exhausting even to the strongest individuals and led to many casualties." (p. 184).
   
   Cyprys provides a level of detail about the Warsaw Uprising usually done by Polish authors. We read, for instance, about the devastating effects of the German nebelwerfer ("roaring cow" or "cupboard"), and the systematic destruction of Warsaw by Germans AFTER the Uprising.



2. It is ironic that the author of this amazing journal never saw her work published, instead it was her two daughters who published it after her death. It is a gripping read,and recounts how the author escapes a death train heading to Treblinka by sawing off the bars on the window of the train and jumping out of it into the wilderness, together with her 2 yr old daughter! It is so much more than an account of survival, it gives one pause for thought as to what one would do given similar circumstances...I myself am mother to a toddler, and reading this just made me feel connected to the author, in that I too would do anything for my child, but do I possess the same courage as Ruth? It's impossible to imagine her life in occupied Poland, trying to live on the Aryan side, amongst Gentiles, keeping her daughter amongst strangers, not knowing if she will be saved...this is an amazing account of a woman's courage, a mother's love, and undying faith.



3. I read this book about 6 years ago, in a period when I read every Holocaust testimony I could lay my hands on, to help me understand the first hand testimony I, alone, had received from a lifelong friend who herself survived the Vilna ghetto, and three concentration camps.
   
   As Cat R reports, the author's daughter found her mother's manuscript in 1979, after the former had died. The text gives a very personal account of the Nazi invasion of Poland, this one from the perspective of a Warsaw native shipped with her small daughter, in January 1943, aboard a cattle car from the ghetto, bound to a certain death at Treblinka.
   
   Certain except that she fought back. She knew from rumors what happened there. With a hacksaw blade she had concealed, she determined to saw through the bars of one of two small windows in her car, and reached them from the shoulders of two strong young boys willing to help her.
   
   To ensure that the boys threw her daughter out the window after she had jumped, Eva gave a bag of chocolate, sugar and bread to a sympathetic friend too old to join her, and asked her to ensure they got it if they did as she had asked.
   
   The jump was but the beginning of one Jewish mother's perilous and somehow miraculous bid to survive--with her child.
   
   In the end, this sufferings of this mother and child were far less severe than those of my friend Masha. Nevertheless, this is a gripping, and important account, not to be missed.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



4. This wartime memoir was discovered by the author's daughter in 1979, following her mother's death. It relates the events of the Nazi persecution in Poland, the suffering and degradation of the Warsaw Ghetto ... and an extraordinary courage and will to survive. Realizing the fate in store for her, Ruth made plans for escape. In the winter of 1943, she and two-year-old Eva were rounded up and crowded into a cattle-car for the fatal journey to Treblinka. A single chance for life remained to them: a perilous jump from the moving train. Their first night of freedom was spent huddling together in a freezing, abandoned dog-kennel, with Ruth licking her daughter's wounds. In their danger-fraught flight for survival, they encountered kind-hearted Catholics who risked their lives to aid a Jewish mother and child. This book is a powerful first-hand account of terrifying times, and a testimony to a mother's courage.



5. This would have to be one of the few diaries that tells the story of the horror of the Holocaust. Ruth lives through many tough situations, where her quick thinking saves her and her daughter Eva. It paints a clear picture of how people in Warsaw were treated, and how the Germans got rid of the Jews in the Ghetto and in Warsaw. It is rather sad, but it is true. If you read this story, you will learn first hand about the life that Jews lived in the Holocaust. I suggest reading it!

No comments about Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-generation Memoir.

No comments about God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination.

No comments about Daughter of the Waves: Memories of Growing Up in Pre-War Palestine.

5 comments about Jewish Heroes & Heroines of America: 150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism.

1. One- hundred and fifty Jewish heroes are chosen as having made significant contributions to American life. The author Brody who is of a military background himself devotes more than the usual space to Jewish military heroes and participants in all of America's wars. He does the commendable work of making known to a larger public many quiet heroes whose deeds have been far greater than their public names.
   The book is excellent, but far, in my opinion, from perfect. It does not include enough of the cultural heroes , the scientists, writers, and other creators who have so enriched American life. It does not in my opinion always include the best examples from a particular area of endeavor.
   Nonetheless it is a wonderful compilation which can only deepen the appreciation of the Jewish contribution to American life.



2. I found this book during a Web search on astronaut Judith Resnik, who was the first Jew in space and the second woman in space. (Sadly, she perished in the Challenger explosion -- may she rest in peace.) Judith Resnik is included in this book, along with 149 other American Jews who, in many different ways, are real heroes that we can all look up to. The biographies are well-written and easy reading, suitable for classroom or home. A wonderful resource that should be in every Jewish library.



3. And one of the stories in the book, one of the 150 illustrated true stories of American heroism included in "Jewish Heroes & Heroines of America : 150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism", which was published in 1996, is now the main focus of an entire book by Oregon newspaper columnist Bob Welch, who has written the story of Lieutenant Frances Slanger of the U.S. Army Nurses Corps during WWII. She was a nurse who died in Normandy while serving as an army nurse there. The book by Welch is titled "American Nightingale: The Story of Frances Slanger" and is also available via amzon.com



4. Last year when Mr. Brody was a guest speaker at a B'nai Brith meeting here in Century Village, Boca Raton, I purchased a copy of JEWISH HEROES & HEROINES OF AMERICA. After reading it from cover to cover, I realized that this book should be in every "JEWISH" home. I highly recommend it as the perfect gift for HANUKAH. Since I write a monthly column in our community newspaper I would like permission to review it.In my last column
   I reviewed JUDAISM & VEGETARIANISM by PROF. RICHARD SCHWARTZ.
   
   Also if possible I would appreciate 2 or 3 complimentary copies to pass around at our Living Room Learning Club, and at our next B'nai Brith meeting.THANK YOU.

   Judy Lipman -3031 Wolverton B - Boca Raton, Fl. 33434 (Phone (561) 487- 4281




5. Every generation of children needs heroes: people to look up to, admire, respect and emulate as one is growing up. At a time when intermarriage rates are rising and assimilation is a growing phenomenon, it is important to instill in our youth a strong sense of Jewish pride in the Jewish men and women who have overcome adversity to become legends in their own time. Seymour Brody has provided a wonderful biographical tool to teach Jewish and non-Jewish children about the important contributions American Jews have made in various ways in this wonderful update to his Jewish Heroes of America. Brody has made this edition more egalitarian by adding biographical profiles of an additional fifty women (including Jenny Maas Flexner).

   Brody's brief (2 pages), but informative, biographical sketches highlight where the heroes have lived and worked, what awards they have won, what professions they have worked in and what accomplishments have brought them fame and the respect of both Jews and non-Jews in America. When known, he also mentions whether they are Ashkenazi or Sephardi and their religious affiliation. Brody's book covers the whole span of American history from the prerevolutionary years to the present. Examples of Jewish soldiers are given for every war that the U.S. has fought. Among the people that are represented are lawyers, rabbis, politicians, businessmen, entertainers, athletes and health care workers. Each entry is accompanied by an illustration by award-winner Art Seiden.

   An improvement over the previous edition is the inclusion of a name index, although a subject index and bibliography / reading list are still lacking. At times, the entries read less like narratives and more like resumes. Sometimes, Brody is too vague, using phrases like "played an important role" instead of telling what the specific accomplishments were. It would have been better if Brody has chosen a greater number of stronger role models (he includes Jews who rarely acknowledged their faith and Jews who intermarried).

   Overall, the book does an excellent job of paying tribute to Jews from most of the states who have left their mark on America. By including first-generation Americans, Brody also demonstrates that what has made America thrive for centuries is its willingness to accept people from every nation and from every culture, letting them live in a home of freedom where they can fulfill their every dream. This book is very highly reccommended for public, school, synagogue and general Judaica collections for both young adult and children's collections

No comments about Diamonds & Demons: The Joseph Gutnick Story.